Leon Kuhn obituary

Monday 10 February 2014 11.31 EST
First published on Monday 10 February 2014 11.31 EST

My brother Leon Kuhn, the political cartoonist, who has died aged 59, was also an activist (being a long-time member of the Socialist Workers party), an accomplished musician and a devotee of karate.

Leon was born in London, the son of Martin, a property developer and Kindertransport refugee, and Doris (nee Berman), a gabardine importer. Leon's interest in cartoons started at the age of six, when he began copying the works of Michael Cummings. But he soon developed his own style and, at the age of 14, while at University College school, won the Observer's national political cartoon competition.

He entered the Slade art school in London at the age of 17 but after about a year suddenly announced that he was catching the Trans-Siberian Express to Japan. He settled in Tokyo, scratching out a living teaching English as a foreign language. It was here that he not only met Akemi, whom he married several years later, but also discovered karate, which he studied and practised, almost daily, for the next 38 years.

On his return to London in 1979 Leon found it impossible to secure a regular outlet for his work, although his cartoons appeared, from time to time, in the New Statesman, News on Sunday, Socialist Worker, New Internationalist, Green Socialist and, more recently, the Morning Star.

In 1983 Leon published The Big Bang for Bureaucrats, a series of cartoons depicting the absurdities of those emergency circulars instructing local government officials how to prepare for the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Leon described this work as attempting "a different type of political cartooning that is at the same time more informative and more offensive".

Leon's work remained largely unpublished and it was perhaps his frustration at the lack of recognition that eventually prompted him to take his cartoons on to the street. Harnessing his art to the anti-war movement that sprang up in 2001 with the Nato attack on Afghanistan, and working closely with Artists Against the War, Leon created two cartoon postcards which he also turned into large posters and, standing at the top of Park Lane, began advertising his work.

He found himself overwhelmed by demonstrators wanting to buy his cards, and was to become a familiar sight at demonstrations with his improvised sandwich board, drawing crowds queuing up to buy his latest work. I still remember the day he phoned, in great excitement, to tell me that he had just seen a photograph of a poster-size image of his postcard Mad Dogs and Englishmen on the side of a rickshaw in Dhaka. It was not unusual to see photographs of Leon's work carried at antiwar demonstrations in cities as far afield as San Francisco, Rome and Mexico. His work even featured in the 2006 film Children of Men and in Mark Wallinger's 2007 Turner Prize entry State Britain.

Leon was responsible for most of the visual art for the Respect party's election campaigns (2004-07). He also produced, in collaboration with Colin Gill, Topple the Mighty (2005), a "wrecker's guide to London statues", examining the darker deeds concealed behind a number of well known statues. A good selection of Leon's art can be seen at leonkuhn.org.uk